Source Analysis Reading
Verify Before You Believe. Four Moves.
You cannot tell a real photo from an AI one by staring harder. Verification isn't about the thing in front of you — it's about everything around it. Mike Caulfield's method is four moves, and a skilled checker runs them in under a minute.
S — Stop. The instant you feel the urge to believe or share, stop. Strong emotion is the tell: misinformation is engineered to make you react before you think. The Pentagon image worked because people reacted in seconds. Your first move is to not move.
I — Investigate the source. Who is actually telling you this? Not what the post says — who posted it, and what are they? A blue tick is not a credential. Open a new tab and look the source up laterally (what do OTHERS say about them) rather than reading their own "About" page.
F — Find better coverage. Don't evaluate the claim where you found it — go find the best coverage of it. If a real explosion hit the Pentagon, every wire service on earth would have it. If only one anonymous account does, that absence IS the answer.
T — Trace claims, quotes and media to the original. Follow it home. Reverse-image-search the photo, find the original study behind the statistic, locate the full quote. Most misinformation dies the moment you reach its origin — because the origin doesn't exist, or says something different.
These moves work on an AI deepfake and a miscaptioned photo and a true-but-gutted statistic alike, because they all fail the same test: they cannot survive contact with their own source.
- 1
The Pentagon image was fake but moved markets. Which SIFT move — done in 10 seconds — would have stopped it?
Reveal answer
Find better coverage: a real Pentagon explosion would be on every wire service instantly. Its absence everywhere else exposes the single fake post.
- 2
What does it mean to “investigate the source LATERALLY”?
Reveal answer
Instead of reading the source’s own About page, open a new tab and see what OTHER, independent sources say about them — their reputation, not their self-description.
- 3
Why is a TRUE statistic sometimes more dangerous than a made-up one?
Reveal answer
Because it carries a real receipt — stripped of context (timeframe, baseline, definition) a true number can imply something false while surviving a lazy “is it real?” check. Only Tracing it to origin restores the meaning.